How The Phoenician Scheme’s star manifested her dream role into existence

At first glance, Wes Anderson’s new film The Phoenician Scheme is a story about a ruthless plutocrat, Zsa-zsa Korda, determined to bulldoze everything in his path to put his titular masterplan into action. (Sound familiar?) It’s a high-stakes game and Korda has many opponents: rival tycoons, the US government, political radicals, and a string of deadly assassins. But it’s his relationship with his only daughter Liesl – a pipe-smoking nun-in-training who he’s singled out to take over the family business – that emerges as the real heart of the film and its most compelling storyline, even as they face off against plane crashes, poisonings, and business deals gone sour.

Stoic and stone-faced, Liesl is played by the 24-year-old actor Mia Threapleton, a newcomer amid a star-studded cast of Anderson’s favourite collaborators. Zsa-zsa, for instance, is played by The French Dispatch’s Benicio Del-Toro, while the likes of Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, and Rupert Friend return from Asteroid City. That said, it’s another first-timer, Michael Cera, who plays Bjørn, a Norwegian tutor and entomologist who falls hopelessly in love with Liesl and accompanies the family duo on their journey to raise funds for her dad’s dubious infrastructure project.

“This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened in my whole life,” Threapleton tells Dazed in a plush Soho hotel room, in the run-up to The Phoenician Scheme’s release. “I had wished it since I was 13 years old [but] it’s not something that I had ever dreamed would happen.” And in case you don’t believe that she’s been pining for the role for more than a decade now, Threapleton has proof. She recently found a journal entry from when she was a teenager, she explains, written after her “millionth” rewatch of Moonrise Kingdom. “[It] literally says: ‘Really wish I could work with Wes Anderson some day.’”

This doesn’t mean that she was prepared for the request when it came through from her agent, asking her to audition for the director’s latest project. “I had to put the phone down,” she says. “I [thought]: ‘No, they’ve got that wrong. I don’t think I’m meant to have this audition.” Nevertheless, she recorded a tape and – after weeks of “horrible” waiting – was invited to an in-person meeting with Anderson in London. Recalling this process, waiting to meet him for the first time, she mimics her nervous anticipation. “Then he opened the door... and he was wearing pink socks, hotel slippers, striped trousers, a blue shirt and glasses, and gave me a really lovely hug. And I just thought, ‘Oh, I’m a bit less nervous now.’”

[Wes] was wearing pink socks, hotel slippers, striped trousers... And I just thought, ‘Oh, I’m a bit less nervous now.’

Obviously, Threapleton got the role. Having made her movie acting debut alongside her mother in 2014’s A Little Chaos (and yes, her mum is Kate Winslet), followed by a number of TV projects from 2022 onwards, she calls The Phoenician Scheme “by far and away the best learning environment” of her career so far, mostly because everyone involved was “so horrifyingly talented”. But they were also very supportive, backing up the widespread reports of a family-like atmosphere on Anderson’s sets. 

Take the first day of shooting, for example, which revolved around Liesl and Zsa-zsa’s first meeting in his suitably opulent mansion. “It’s not like a little diorama set,” she explains. “It’s this big marble room. You’re in it, living and breathing in that space.” She was “very, very nervous” when she first stepped in, dressed in her nun’s uniform, she says, but Del-Toro helped calm her nerves, playing a much more attentive paternal role than he does in the film itself. Then, there was Michael Cera. “He's hysterical,” she adds. “I had to bite the inside of my cheek so many times [to] not to ruin a take, because he was so hilarious.” 

Because Anderson’s sets don’t subscribe to strict hierarchies – with “no division between cast members and crew members” – Threapleton would watch Michael Cera and Wes experiment with new takes and ideas in real-time. “It’s such an infectious environment,” she adds. Meanwhile, she put plenty of her own creative energy into shaping Sister Liesl, from travelling to Rome for custom fittings and attending church services (along with all the other 18 to 24-year-olds), to designing her own props to be used in the film. Allowing actors and other creatives to bring their own elements to the production, she says: “Wes is almost like the conductor. And [it’s] an amazing experience, being conducted by him.”

Throughout The Phoenician Scheme, Liesl emerges as a kind of moral compass for her father, setting strict boundaries for their business practices and refusing to back down. Bit by bit, she changes his cutthroat ways, but she’s changed by him too, adopting a taste for the finer things in life (and booze). This complexity was all there in the script, says Threapleton: “The second I started reading, it all just flowed and painted this beautiful, Technicolor painting in my head.”

Like Liesl and Zsa-zsa, did she find herself changed in any way by the end of the shoot? “I have more appreciation for the art form,” she decides, after a moment’s thought. “Not just what you see in the end, but all the tiny details. There were background painters [...] literally painting the tiniest edge of a door frame, that you would never notice, but it’s important. I have so much respect and admiration for all of those little bits that I hadn’t noticed much before.”

The Phoenician Scheme is out in UK cinemas now.